


the opposite of good is drowning

by aelibia



Series: The Tenacity of Stoats [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Arranged Marriage, Child Neglect, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Japanese war fan, Kukuri-San (Original Character), Mah-Hime (Original Character), Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Power Dynamics, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, Queer Character, Series, Shukaku (One-Tail), Sunagakure | Hidden Sand Village, Weasels, Yandere, more gen than pairing because they are children, mustelidae, ninja clan, original stoat character, suna worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-12-21 09:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21072794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelibia/pseuds/aelibia
Summary: Sakura was only six when she met the boy she was supposed to marry. Plucked overnight from her home in Konoha, she and her family have returned to the windswept land of her mother's birth to suffer an old punishment and to pay an even older debt.





	1. someone who knows your name is your friend

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reverseharem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reverseharem/gifts).

> So I was inspired by the Yandere Gaara posts by kyoties on tumblr. I went to the fluff store to get more ideas and all they had was angst and suffering. I think there's some fluff at the very bottom of the box I got, but we can't let all this angst go stale.

She met him for the first time when she was six. He was six, too, she was told.

That morning, when her mother pinned her scarf to her hair--green, to bring out your pretty eyes--Sakura kicked her feet back and forth in the chair at her mother’s vanity and asked persistent questions.

“What does he look like?”

“Sakura--”  _ pin, pin,  _ “--they sent us a photo. It’s practically ragged from all the times you’ve looked at it.”

“Is it broken?”

“No, I’m saying you’ve looked at it hundreds of times. You  _ know _ what he looks like.”

“Mom, I kno-ow. I just want you to  _ tell _ me again. The story.”

“Oh, Sakura.”  _ Pin, pin. _ “Do you want anything on your scarf?” She reached for a basket of small straight pins behind her. Some were decorated with shiny rocks and metal designs. Sakura’s favorites were the ones with animal designs.

_ “Story.”  _ Kick, kick went her legs.

Her mother sighed. “I’ll tell you the story after you pick your pin.”

“I want my kitty pin.” 

“All right.”

“Start from the beginning.”

Her mother laughed then. “What, all the way back to when you were born?”

“That’s when it all started, you said.”

Spin, spin went the chair. Her mother swept Sakura into her arms; and hugged her tightly.

“Seems like you know it better than me by now.” Strong hands carried her to the bed and stood her up on top of it, where her mother began scrutinizing Sakura’s outfit with a practiced eye. “Maybe you should tell it, little worm.”

“You’re  _ teasing _ me.”

“I am! Is it wrong for a mother to want to keep her daughter just for herself a little longer?” Sad eyes. She had the sad eyes again. She had them more and more these days.

“When I was born in Grass…”

“Yes, yes. That’s how it starts, isn’t it?”

* * *

When Sakura was born in Grass, it was a bad year. The Third War had just ended, and Grass had been utterly devastated in the crossfire between the Great Nations. What small forces Grass possessed were either dead or in hiding, unable to defend civilians except in small pockets of resistance. 

Sakura’s mother had been one of the lucky ones. Earlier, when the fighting began to get too close to the village where she was staying--

_ Because you weren’t from Grass, were you? You were from Wind. _

_ I’m getting to that, little one.  _

\--then what remained of the local shinobi force gathered up the civilians and as many provisions as everyone could carry, and headed to the valleys to hide in the hill caves. In a country composed of mostly grassland, there 

weren’t many other places  _ to _ hide, and no harsh dunes or angry sun to ward off trespassers. 

That had been where she’d met Kizashi. A grass native and shinobi, Kizashi had been one of the ones guarding the small group, keeping everyone’s spirits up with his horrible puns.

_ And he knew you were different. _

_ He did. _

It hadn’t taken long for everyone to figure out she wasn’t actually a civilian visiting from Wind, but his dramatic confrontation of her had been off the mark. She wasn’t a civilian, but not a shinobi, either. In Wind, those that belonged to some of the more remote tribes didn’t bother swearing fealty to the daimyo or sending family members to be trained in Sand. The daimyo’s authority had always been shaky in expansive, far-flung Wind, and while Mebuki  _ had _ been trained in the shinobi arts, she certainly wasn’t a spy.

Killing a scout from Wind the next day who strayed too close to the cave earned everyone’s trust well enough, even if they might have still thought she was lying.

Most days were boring. Far from the unending excitement of war movies and books, true war passed from one day to the next in a stream of mediocrity only to be interrupted unexpectedly by violent activity. 

Sakura didn’t know many details about her mother’s time in the cave. Some things, her mother said, she simply wasn’t old enough to know yet. What Sakura was allowed to know was that it was in the cave that her father fell in love with her mother, and where she was made and born.

_ You stayed in there that long? _

_ Well, a couple times we left. We thought it was over sooner than it was, that sort of thing. It wasn’t really over until you were born. _

_ But you couldn’t go back to the Grass village. _

Burned out husks were all that remained of the village her mother had visited, and where her father called home. After that, what was there left to do but pack up and leave? Everyone scattered, the Grass shinobi with the blessing of their highest commanding officer, who decided to retire himself and shamble off into the sunset. 

Sakura’s father had left their fate up to her mother, who didn’t need to hear more than two horror stories from displaced Wind residents passing by to decide not to go back home. They ended up choosing Fire Country as a destination because neither had a history there. It would be easy to slip in, especially when both could offer skills as shinobi, which Konoha wouldn’t be in any position to turn a nose up at.

_ But they found you. The tribe. _

Her mother’s eyes always grew the saddest at this part.

_ They did, little one. They found me, and they wanted me to come back. So we did. _

_ And then they told you I would marry someone very important, because it’s for the good of the tribe. _

* * *

Her mother buried her face in Sakura’s head scarf, breathing in deeply the way Sakura sometimes caught her doing when she came home tired. 

“I’m sorry, Sakura. I hope you know that I love you very much.”

Mebuki squeezed her daughter into a tight hug, and even when it started to hurt Sakura didn’t say anything. She didn’t know why her mother was sorry, but she was only six and didn’t understand a lot of things yet.

“Don’t be sorry. I love you, too!”

“You’re a good girl, Sakura.”

“I’m going to meet my boy today!”

“Yes. Yes, you are.”

Her mother picked Sakura up like a baby and carried her, giggling, into the living room where her father waited.

* * *

The adults in the playroom stood at the edges like unhappy statues, mouths drawn into tight lines so stiff not even wrinkles were left. If she’d been watching, Sakura would have noticed that the adults fell into three groups, all of whom radiated hostility for one another in their body language: the boy’s caretakers, her own parents, and a representative from the tribe, who’d come to fetch the Haruno trio from their home. Sakura’s mother had her hand on Sakura’s shoulder, the grip unyielding even when Sakura rolled her shoulders in an attempt to send a message.

But in that moment, she had eyes only for the boy, who looked exactly like his picture, only a little less dusty. 

His outfit was simple, far less fancy than what her mother had made her wear. A new wrap sat on his shoulders of a dark forest green, with embroidery at the borders. Someone had attempted in vain to comb his hair. Sharp blue-green eyes scanned her up and down, and the longer they stood in front of one another the tighter he clutched at the stuffed animal in his hands. As Sakura looked around the room, she saw many other stuffed animals, dozens even. His face was flushed. She wondered if he was sick.

“Gaara,” One of his caretakers spoke softly to Gaara, the one with the kinder face. He went to Gaara and knelt down at his side, taking one of his hands. “This is Sakura. She’s going to be your new friend.”

Gaara turned to regard the man who spoke. “But you said--”

“That won’t come until later, when you’re much older. For now she’ll just be coming over to play with you every so often.”

“Every day?”

“Maybe. If you want that, and if you play well with her.”

The grip tightened almost to the point of bruising.

“Mebuki.” That was the tribal elder. She was a stern woman who Sakura had never really liked, and lately Sakura had seen all too much of her at the house. “We will leave them alone for a time. Kazekage-sama, let us into the next room to discuss this arrangement further.”

Now both hands rested on Sakura’s shoulders, clenching. “Mah-hime, is this really safe--?”

“Mebuki-san.” Gaara’s caretaker stood, bowing politely to her mother. “I assure you there is no danger. Gaara-sama has had a good day today. And we will be in the next room.”

A shaky breath that Sakura heard and felt, but did not see. “Very well. Please lead the way.”

* * *

“Your hair is  _ very  _ red.” 

The boy, Gaara, remained standing in place when all the adults had left, and his only reaction to her comment was to flush even deeper. For a minute, Sakura wondered if he’d stand there forever, but she quickly grew bored and helped herself to some of his toys. 

She settled on a ball, deciding that if he didn’t catch it she’d play in a corner by herself. No need to let this mountain of playthings go to waste. She only remembered his hands were full at the apex of the ball’s trajectory and wondered if her parents would make her apologize for hitting her future husband in the face on their first meeting.

Just when she thought the ball would make contact, though, a tendril of something long, stringy, and a bit sparkly shot out from a darkened corner and caught the ball deftly in a sandy claw. Her mouth dropped open in shock, and the boy’s eyes grew wide and scared. He dropped the stuffed bear and stepped forward on shaky legs, holding his arms out towards her in obvious panic. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes.

“Oh my gosh,” Sakura said.

“Oh, no! I didn’t mean to--I wasn’t supposed to--please don’t run away, I wasn’t--”

“That is  _ so awesome!” _ Gaara stopped in his tracks so quickly he almost fell over. Sakura decided to be gracious and ignore it. “Are you doing that on purpose? Can I throw more stuff at you?” Blindly, she groped to the side for another toy, readying for launch with a backward swing.

“Well, I don’t...really like it when people throw things at me. Other kids do that a lot.”

“Oh.” She knew  _ that _ feeling. The toy dropped from her hand. “Can you  _ make _ things?”

The boy’s eyes shined, but not with tears this time.

“Only if you promise not to tell my uncle.”

When the adults came back into the room later, all they saw were two happy children, who were perhaps a bit sweatier than they should have been, playing make-believe with two ceramic horses. The room was cleaner of sand than it had been upon arrival, but no one noticed. 

As her parents swept her out the door, Sakura chanced a look back over her shoulder at Gaara, who held his uncle’s hand and completely ignored everything the man was saying. He looked back at Sakura, waved, and smiled.


	2. you can learn to love something just for being familiar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me readin y'alls comments about how cute and enjoyable this is: [that meme of the girl smiling at the camera while the house is on fire]

“And you’re sure he didn’t do anything wrong to you?”

“What do you mean, mom?”

“Well, unnatural. Any strange abilities that normal people don’t have.”

“No.”

“Sakura…”

“Mom, I don’t  _ know. _ ”

“Don’t cry, don’t cry. I’m sorry. Your momma’s just worried. I wouldn’t want him to hurt you.”

“He didn’t hurt me, I promise.”

* * *

It was really hard to get used to the weather here. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

Konoha, what she remembered of it, had been full of color and plants and animals and  _ water. _ Here there was hardly any water. The air was so dry it made her skin dry and her lips chapped, and she learned pretty quickly not to try and slip away from her morning application of lotion and oil from Kukuri-san, the kind, black-haired woman who minded her during the day when her parents were away.

The estate where she lived now didn’t look anything like the small house they’d lived in, either. Everyone here was related to her in some way, which was really weird when no one at all had been related to her back home. She knew about some of the clans in Konoha having their own space, a little bit. She’d seen the compounds where outsiders weren’t allowed and her parents had said they were for really important, old families. She was curious and spied from trees a few times, but never had she been in one.

Here was almost like that, except instead of the walls being inside a bigger city, there was a small village surrounding it, with people who weren’t in the tribe, her minder said. They were here because a long time ago, before the hidden village was made, the only way people without the ability to protect themselves could make their way in the harsh landscape was to attach themselves to an established tribe. These people were the descendants of those long-ago people.

Inside, there was a giant house where the most important people lived, but everyone else lived in shared dwellings. Families had their own bedrooms and living rooms, but the kitchen, dining, laundry, and bathrooms were all communal. It was almost like apartments, except they were all one floor and made of stone, and when you walked in you stepped down into the ground a little. Kukuri-san said it was to keep the houses cool, because the farther underground you went, the safer you were from the sun. 

The whole place was almost like a giant garden (if you could call it that; it was just a bunch of cactuses and raked sand and stones) with an oasis in the middle where she was  _ not _ allowed to swim. Her exploration in the first few weeks had led to quite a few horticultural revelations, most of which were painful for her curious hands. The big spikes were obvious and she’d only flicked them with the tip of her fingers, but some of them had tiny spines that you couldn’t even see, and they  _ burned _ .

There were a few scraggly trees, nothing like Hashirama’s ancient giants she played underneath at home, but they were sturdy enough for climbing. She liked to sit on the branches and watch the villagers work beyond the walls. Her favorites were the glassblowers.

It did rain, sometimes. When it did, it seemed like the whole sky poured out at once, spending itself in as little as ten minutes. She’d been up in the tree once when one such storm came, and the sparse canopy offered no sanctuary and she’d had to wait it out. Flowers sprang up all over the rocky plains in the hour afterward, though, so it was worth it.

Today when she climbed her tree, her favorite glassblower smiled and waved at her, and when he went home for the day he stopped to place a tiny glass horse on the top of the wall, on the part where one of the tree branches reached out just enough.

* * *

Deceiving the adults became a game they both enjoyed.

By her tenth visit, they had their system maximized in order to produce the greatest amount of playtime. They’d almost been caught, once, when the tower of toys he’d been constructing for her amusement came down all at once with a crash. They’d laughed and rolled around on the floor at his uncle’s expression when he burst through the door.

They figured out that the right balance at the start was to hug one another upon arrival, an activity she’d suggested and to which Gaara had become much enamored. This worked better than the careful waves, which produced unnecessary coaxing by the adults, and better than ordering the adults to leave already, which always resulted in scolding.

So far they hadn’t figured out a way to extend the time. According to the clock, once the adults left the room playtime lasted one hour, no more no less. And playtime only came one day a week.

Playing quietly to avoid detection had felt agonizing, but Sakura soon found out that Gaara could do a lot more with his sand than build structures and catch thrown objects. He made them a sandy dome that, when he applied a bit of his chakra to it, produced an effect that dampened the sound from outside, which he demonstrated by going inside and screaming at the top of his lungs. 

“Sometimes I go in here to cry when I don’t want Yashamaru to find out and ask me why,” he offered to Sakura’s curious proddings of his creation. She accepted this without comment and with no small amount of jealousy. It was the  _ ultimate _ hideout.

Sakura’s parents’ eyes were a bit softer these days, though they still checked her carefully for injuries at bath time. She began to notice Gaara’s name more often as well, spoken in hushed whispers by other tribe members. Proximity always silenced the gossips, unfortunately, so she never could properly eavesdrop, but these interludes usually ended with a hand on her head and a “poor girl” or “it just isn’t right” from her more favorite aunties. 

Her mother pursed her lips when Sakura’d asked her why, and from then on there were no more hands on her head attached to kind aunties.

But it didn’t bother her all that much. She had a friend and his name was Gaara and the sandcastles he built for her were  _ real. _

* * *

At night, sometimes her parents argued in their bedroom. Sakura always sneaked closer to listen, even though sometimes what she heard made her scared. This conversation wasn’t just about Gaara, though--and could the other conversations have been? He certainly didn’t look like a monster, and she couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.

“We could still leave, you know.”

“Kizashi, I cannot leave her here.”

“It would only be for a little while, you know that. Wind and Fire are trying to repair relations, and we have connections there now. If we sued for custody over international borders and claimed duress, they’d fight for us, Mebuki. You know they would.”

“I can’t, I can’t...they’ll hurt her. They’ll let him tear her up, I can’t--”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Come here.”

“We should never have come back. We should have tried to run.”

“Shh, shh.”

“I never thought she’d use her own granddaughter to punish me. I never thought anyone could be that wicked.”

Sakura waited for several more minutes for the crying to stop, and then crept back to her bedroom on all fours, crawling headfirst into the side of the covers and curling into a ball underneath. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t go back to sleep.

* * *

The other kids didn’t like her here. She didn’t know why.

Sakura was not a very brave person. She knew this about herself, and hated it. A small, guilty part of herself was glad they’d left Konoha, even though her parents had cried and cried over it. In Konoha she’d left behind a lot of kids who’d been nothing but mean to her no matter what she did. Their hatred was hot and sharp and unexpected.

Here, the other kids in the family were cold and slippery. They wouldn’t play with her. They wouldn’t even look at her. They called her the Monster Bride, and even when she cried and asked why, all they did was leave in a silent huddle. 

She wished there was something she could fix so she could be a person people wanted to like.

* * *

“How come you don’t have any other friends in Suna?”

They were inside an enormous tortoise shell of sand. The sandcastles were cool, but she’d wanted to see what else he could do, what else he knew how to make. He tried telling her about the real thing, a native species of reptile he’d seen himself outside the city walls once, training with his father.

Gaara stilled. He didn’t really like when she asked him about his life here, but she’d heard the adults talking again last night, and she couldn’t imagine Gaara not having friends. Not when he made such amazing things for them to play with.

“Don’t know.” He became interested in the minute details of embroidery along the edge of his shawl.

“You make so many cool things. I bet everyone wants to be your friend.”

Gaara shrugged, and Sakura gave up. For now.

“It’s not fair that I can only play with you here. They make me go back to the tribe the second we’re done. I didn’t even get to try any of the snacks on the snack carts today. Is there something going on?”

Gaara brightened again and dropped his shawl. He nodded excitedly. “A festival for the spring rains. They’re coming soon. It’ll be all wet for days and days.”

“I bet it’s nice,” Sakura said. She gently pushed a doll his way and they began dressing and undressing their respective figures, comparing end results and complementing one another’s artistic talent.

“I don’t get to go,” Gaara said. “I’m never allowed when there’s lots of people.” He pressed his lips together, looking at his playmate sideways.

Sakura wondered if this was some test of friendship, to see if she’d take the bait. “Okay,” she tested. Gaara relaxed again. 

“So,” Sakura continued after a period of silence. “There’s a drunk man that comes from Suna to the tribe sometimes and yells over the wall.”

“Who?”

“Dunno. He’s a shinobi. He keeps yelling over the back wall about sacrifices. I heard him tell my parents that they’re bad people for selling me to a monster. I don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s always really late when he does it. Like two in the morning.” 

She spun her doll in a circle and decided that her name was Cactus Flower, and that she was very rich and had three husbands and three wives, just like the mean old lady in charge of her tribe that she’d met only once. It took her five minutes to realize that Gaara had abandoned his doll entirely and was now peering at her with a solemn expression. She shivered, unsure from where the sudden thickness of the air had arrived.

“Gaara? Is everything okay? Your eyes are a little scary.”

“Do you want him to stop? I can make him stop.”

“Um,” Sakura said. “I don’t know.” She shifted the weight in her legs slightly, feeling oddly compelled to run, though she ordered her body to stay still. “He’s just drunk. That’s what my mom said.”

“It’s not nice, what he said to you. He’s wrong.”

A feeling she didn’t have a name for crept down her body in tremulous increments. Invisible, heady waves of something animalistic and dangerous seemed to engulf her, and centered on the slight, red-haired boy sitting with her beneath a canopy of sandy scutes.

“You’re right,” she said, holding her breath after. Several tense minutes passed and then so did the feelings, melting back into the atmosphere like they’d never been there. 

When her parents came to pick her up, they commented on her uncharacteristic silence once they passed the city walls, and asked her if she was all right. Sakura did not answer, too absorbed in the memory of cold, empty eyes.

The drunk man didn’t come to yell that night, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the way he also failed to come the next night, and the night after that, and all the nights after. Knowing better by now than to ask her parents about mysterious happenings, she tried an auntie next door, who only shared a look with her wife, one of those deep, weighty looks that grown-ups did when Sakura wasn’t supposed to know the answer. They did offer her some advice, however.

“When you visit that boy again,” her aunties said, “be careful not to show anger to anyone you dislike.” Sakura didn’t know what that had to do with anything, but sometimes an auntie’s behavior was beyond comprehension.

“It’s bad luck,” they offered by way of explanation.

The next time she saw Gaara, he was all smiles again, and Sakura felt relieved that he wasn’t mad at her. But this time, when he made them a tent of sandy egret feathers, the tacky smell of blood filled the space underneath, and she refused to go in. The longer she hesitated, the more she became aware of the sound of millions of sand grains piling and bumping up against one another, the hum like a swarm of a million whispering bees.

“Gaara?”

“Hmm?” The rest of his sand undulated lazily in the air above them, images of animals and food and people forming and sinking down into the grains over and over. He smiled at her again, and she thought she’d never seen him so calm, so much at peace.

“Can we play something else today? Maybe not the sand this time. It smells funny. Wanna play hide and seek?”

He didn’t even hesitate, and the sand fell away, back into his gourd tucked shyly in the corner.

“Okay.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What an INFLUX of comments for chapter one. Continue this flood of validation, I say. I feast upon your words.
> 
> There will be a bit more of a break until chapter 3. For me. So like a week.


	3. you will always be found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do yourself a favor and look up "singing sand dunes" on the YouTubes. At least when you're dying of dehydration in Butt Ass Nowhere, Desert Town the landscape will sing your soul a lullaby.

One day, a finely dressed servant came to the house in the middle of the day and took Sakura to meet Mah-hime—the elder who’d taken Sakura and her parents to meet the Gaara boy. 

Mah-hime lived in the big house, Kukuri-san had said, looking a bit rumpled and out of breath.

Indeed, that had been their final destination, as the servant led Sakura and Kukuri-san through a maze of corridors that twisted farther and farther inward, until they eventually reached a circular courtyard with more flora than Sakura had seen in months. There was even a fruit tree—though the servant had implored Sakura and Kukuri-san to remain seated at a bench until summoned. Sakura scurried into the courtyard and tugged on a low-hanging fruit with both hands; the fruit was still young and clung to its branch with steadfastness in the face of the little girl’s attempt.

“No regard for instruction, I see. How like your mother you are.”

Sakura startled and released the fruit with a snap. The elasticity of the thin branch sends it bobbing, wildly, as she turned to the voice. Mah-hime was dressed in deceptively plain clothing—unembroidered, forest-green silks that cost more than a villager’s house—and sat on a bench right in the center of the garden. She held a fan open in her lap, painting the leaves. 

Bottles of color had been arranged in a confusing manner across the bench and the ground about her feet.

“Those fruits are poisonous. They’re for looking, not for eating. Come here.” A hard voice, one not accustomed to disobedience. Sakura felt her curiosity from earlier drain straight out of her body through the soles of her feet.

Numbly, she shuffled forward until she stood in front of Mah-hime, who did not look up from her painting. A servant came out and threw a whole chicken into a pond closer to one far edge of the room. From the dark shadow in the center, an enormous fish came up and delicately took the offering, vanishing into unseen depths without even a bubble.

The clack of bone against wood rang loudly in the quiet space when Mah-hime finally put her fan aside. When she looked at Sakura, Sakura didn’t know what to think of her face. Sometimes adults made their faces go so blank it was hard to tell what they were thinking. But, Sakura thought, at least she didn’t look angry. Extravagant gold bangles clanked together across Mah-hime’s arms when she beckoned Sakura closer; her hand curling upward instead of down—the way people did at home.

“You’re pretty enough,” the elder said, cupping Sakura’s face into both hands. She gave Sakura a once over, eyes lingering at the patches of dust on her clothes from where a bit of roughhousing with the gardener’s daughter had occurred. Mah-hime glanced over to where Kukuri-san waited and Sakura watched the elder’s mouth go thin, and Kukuri-san blush.

“And so foreign-looking, though that’s to be expected. What _ hair _ you have.” Mah-hime’s own hair, whatever color it had been once, was now all bleached white and curled back into an uncompromising bun. A metal fan arrayed at the base, simple and slightly rusted.

Despite her unease, Sakura felt her gaze torn away from Mah-hime’s stern face, redirecting towards the paints on the bench and the fan lying there. A deer frolicked with two fawns on what little Sakura could see of the folds.

“You want to learn? It’s a traditional skill for the women of our tribe. We were the first to use battle fans, you know. Your mother never had the patience for it.”

Sakura nodded, already reaching for a brush, which Mah-hime deftly moved out of her reach. 

“No, no, not that one. You’ll start on paper. These tools are far too delicate for your hands. You’ll learn to steady your hand over time.”

A place for her was cleared on the bench, and for the rest of the afternoon Sakura painted trees and flowers and a city in a forest with walls higher than the tallest building.

* * *

The next time she visited Gaara, he looked a little worse for wear, which took her by surprise. White, clammy skin looked stretched over the bones of his face like the hungry, doomed caravaners in Sakura’s _ Dangers of the Desert _picture book. She thought he might have been trembling a little, too.

“I get bad when the full moon comes,” he offered by way of explanation once his uncle left the room. Kukuri-san had brought her this time and hadn’t even been invited indoors. 

“What do you mean by bad? Like, you get sick?”

His sand wasn’t as lively today, and he conducted sluggish gritty rivers in the air, currents driven by a tempo only he could hear. “No.” He didn’t look at her. “I feel bad. Sometimes I do things I’m not supposed to.”

She sidled up next to him and reached a hand up to brush the underside of a tributary. Its rough material grated her skin.

“Like bad stuff? You get in trouble?” She felt the thickness in the air again, but not as intensely this time. He was satisfied, too. The sand smelled of flowers, like it had been washed. 

He did look at her then, and smiled. “_ No _ one can get _ me _ in trouble.”

Further questions on the topic were ignored in favor of his showing her a new sand sculpture of a creature he’d found while walking in the dunes. When Sakura described the work she’d done with Mah-hime and the fans, he finally listened, and Sakura bathed in the fullness of his attention. She pushed aside her wariness for the time being and resolved not to ask about his mysterious illness again, grateful and not any less desperate for maintaining the only friendship she’d made in Wind thus far.

* * *

“Does she say anything mean to you, Sakura?”

Sakura and her mother sat on the back patio, the tiny private one attached to the back doors of the bedroom. Well, private if you called the small semicircle of stone pavement private. There wasn’t a fence or anything.

Buckets meant for fermenting hot cabbage made serviceable stools when overturned. Sakura sat on one in front of her mother, who braided beaded fossils from the dunes into her pink hair. It wasn’t considered becoming of a lady of high status, but ever since Sakura spied the tiny spirals in the hair of the village children, she’d coveted the look intensely.

In any case, she saw her parents less and less these days. Missions for the tribe, her father said with his eternal cheer. Her mother wouldn’t say where she went all day. They hadn’t taken her to see Gaara for a couple of weeks in a row. And, to Sakura’s great confusion, Mah-hime had taken on the task herself. The old woman was harsh and uncompromising, but she wasn’t all that bad. The last visit she’d pulled Sakura onto the back of an enormous fan, a version of the one she’d painted in her lap, and whisked them both to Suna in half the time it took her parents to.

“Mean? Like what kind of stuff?”

Her mother’s steady hands continued without pause. “Oh, things about where you come from. What you look like. Anything. I just—want to make sure no one is making you unhappy here. You know I love you, don’t you?”

Sakura nodded, unsure of what else to say. It seemed like all the adults in her life these days conspired together to make her worry indescribably about things she didn’t understand. People were upset, but why? People wanted her to do things, but what?

“I know, mom. Thanks for doing my hair.”

Mebuki hummed.

“Does she...say anything about me?” Braid, braid, braid went the hands.

Sakura thought for a moment. “She talks about you sometimes. Not a lot. It’s not nice things. She says you were too lazy to learn the fans, and that you ran away and it was bad for everyone. She says—” Her mother’s left hand came to rest gently on her shoulder, the right hand squeezing the braid tight, tight, tight against her scalp.

“That’s all I wanted to know, Sakura. Thank you.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon in silence, propped against one another on the buckets watching the empty sky.

* * *

Sakura discovered rather quickly that there were some questions Kukuri-san would not answer. “Where do my parents go all day” was one of them, and “why do I have to get married” was another. Kukuri-san also did not like questions about Mah-hime. Questions about the tribe itself tread dangerous waters, depending on what Sakura asked.

“Everyone keeps secrets from me,” Sakura complained. Too old for fits, she had nonetheless thrown herself dramatically onto the floor, pressing her face into the cool tiles while Kukuri-san finished washing the dishes from their afternoon snack. “One day _ I’m _going to get secrets and I’m not going to tell you. Then you’ll be sorry.”

“I’m sure I will be,” Kukuri-san said kindly, resting a damp hand on the back of Sakura’s neck. “Would you like to have a secret that just you and I know?”

Pride kept her body on the floor, but she opened a single eye to stare up at Kukuri-san.

“Mah-hime thinks you’re ready to start practicing katas with a real battle fan. A training one, but not that little tiny thing you’ve been painting on.”

Sakura gasped and sat up. “Really?”

“Yes,” Kukuri-san said. She patted Sakura’s hair down. “Now just remember to act surprised so I don’t get in trouble.” Sakura nodded vigorously. “Well, that’s all my chores. Want to go spy on the craftsmen in the village?”

“Ye-eah!”

Kukuri-san took Sakura by the hand, leading her to the inner gardens where the spying trees grew.

_ Remember to act surprised. _Sakura thought about this, and marveled at grown-ups’ determination to have everything just so. 

Unlike Kukuri-san, Sakura wasn’t worried about Mah-hime. Sakura was _ very_ good at pretending.

* * *

Vibrant green training clothes waited in a crisp, folded pile in the family’s mailbox one morning, with an accompanying note reading that Sakura was to wear them to visit Mah-hime the following day. Sakura, who had practiced painting and folding and unfolding and doing katas with paper and plastic fans for weeks, could hardly contain her excitement.

The servant took Sakura to a different part of the main house this time, not a garden but an outdoor arena that seemed enormous to her. Packed earth and small rocks made up the majority of the terrain. Mah-hime entered some minutes later as she always did—“Reminding you that she’s the one in charge,” her mother said—.--adorned in her own training clothes: billowy linens that hovered away from the skin and attached to the body in tight circles about the extremities.

“This is a practice arena, child,” Mah-hime began once Sakura came to attention before her. “This is a place for children to train and for real shinobi to practice new techniques. When you are improved, we will go out to the desert.”

Sakura only nodded, so thrilled she couldn’t even speak. On Mah-hime’s back was a long battle fan attached to her waist, but in her hands Sakura could see a much smaller fan, one about half the size of Sakura’s body, and she knew without asking that it was for her.

“Your mother does not wish for me to give you this, Sakura. She thinks you aren’t ready for the responsibility. But I had already learned to fan-fly by your age.”

“Why is she so afraid of you?” Sakura blurted out, immediately feeling regret when Mah-hime’s nasty smile returned. 

“She hasn’t told you? Mebuki is my child, girl. My third, with my second husband. She belongs to me, to this family, and so do you.”

An invisible hand, strong and terrible, seemed to grasp Sakura’s insides. She wondered why she felt so afraid, and so very happy.

“This is yours, for now.” Mah-hime approached her with precise steps, handing over the fan to Sakura, who clutched it to her chest. “It’s cheap and I expect you to ruin it properly before we move up to the next level.”

“Am I going to make wind?”

“No, child. First we perform the katas. Take up the hiding weasel stance. Very good. And..._ push.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tad less overt horror in this chapter but some human development existential horror? Who is watching these fckn kids


	4. good is something you will find out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [clears throat] Weasels, stoats, minks, etc. are NOT rodents. They are of the family Mustelidae. While you're still paying attention, rabbits are also not rodents.

Rare days visited when clouds hid the sun with the promise of rain. Not the gentle sprinkles of a Konoha spring or even the blustery thunderstorms of early summer but a torrential downpour that sometimes, Mah-sobo told her, made flash floods that swept away entire villages like they were never there.

One cloudy day found Sakura waiting for Gaara in a city courtyard not far from the Kazekage’s dwelling. Trees and flowers and plants did not grow here; rather, piles of sand filled the circular space. Mah-sobo left her there to wait for Yashamaru and Gaara and then left to conduct some mysterious grown-up business.

Several village children were already there playing in the sand with buckets and shovels and bare hands, reveling in the brief time they had not to get burned by scorching grains. These children were not cold or unkind the way the others at the tribal compound had been: they didn’t approach her, but they also did not scorn Sakura when she sidled up to a group of three attempting to build a sandcastle with no water to bind the sand. One of them even handed Sakura a trowel with a grunt and a glance and she joined in their hopeless errand. 

She knew when Gaara arrived because the village children stiffened and whispered a name, the one hounding Sakura in its bridal alteration.  _ Monster-boy. Demon-boy. We better go before he gets us. _ She watched them run away without comment, but neither did she look behind at the sound of approaching footsteps until a shadow cast itself across her buried hands. Well, she thought, at least we have more buckets now. She wondered if he was still supposed to be hiding his powers from her or if she could ask him to build a two-storey house this time, one that looked like her old home.

Yashamaru watched until Gaara lowered to a squat in front of her, and then they were alone again. Maybe. It was hard to say who was watching in the city. It  _ had _ felt a bit empty for the last bit of walking, save for the other children.

She watched Gaara, following his lead when he grabbed his own bucket and began scooping sand in by hand. Maybe no castles this time, then. When he stood to gather more buckets after that one filled, she followed him and accepted the buckets he passed to her.

How would he react if she asked him outright? The other times she’d pressed he’d retreated into sullen anger, and she had no other friends to fall back on if he cast her aside. But good friends could talk about nearly anything, her father said. Last night she asked her father over dinner what he thought would happen if she asked a friend about something bad, and when her mother gave them both a look Sakura knew she wasn’t nearly as sneaky as she thought she’d been. While tucking her in, her father whispered some advice to her.  _ Be honest, _ he said,  _ but more importantly, be careful.  _

_ He isn’t your friend,  _ her mother said.

“Gaara,” Sakura said. “Why are people afraid of you?” She held her breath when he stopped in his tracks, back stiff and still facing her. “Every time I ask you about this stuff you get mad, but I want to know. What do you do that makes people afraid of you? Why did those kids run away?”

He spun to engage her, round face already tinged with red. It took all of Sakura’s courage not to take a step back. She wouldn’t give up this time, she wouldn’t she wouldn’t—

“Why does it matter so much to you, anyway?” he snapped. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “They’re not your friends.  _ I’m  _ your friend.”

“If you’re my friend, you’ll  _ tell  _ me things, Gaara. Friends tell each other important things!” She felt her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands and fought down the lump in her throat. 

“It’s  _ not _ important. You don’t have to know everything.” He sat down, challenging her display of anger with his own display of forced leisure. Looking around and satisfied by something Sakura could not see or feel, he began hovering the sand into the buckets in steady streams.

“Why do they call you a monster? The kids here said it, too. If we’re friends, you’ll  _ tell _ me.” She was proud of herself when she didn’t even flinch at his indignant glare.

“So what? Do  _ you _ think I’m a monster too?” A challenge. The sand rippled in a way she’d come to associate with his hairier moods.

“No, no!” Hands came up to frame her face in supplication, but her feet stood their ground even as her thighs and the sand around her feet began to shake. “I like you! I promise! But they keep saying it and I don’t  _ understand _ . No one will tell me  _ any _ thing.”

She shrieked when the sand rose up from the ground to envelop her legs up to her waist. Gaara hadn’t stood but began to hunch over and hold his head in his hands, muttering. When she struggled to move the sand held her tighter and when she began beating the sand with terrified fists the sand held those also.

“Gaara,” Sakura pleaded, unable to stop the tears this time, hoping he’d see them and stop, hoping  _ anyone _ would see them and he’d stop. “Please don’t. Gaara, I’m sorry, please stop.”

He did look at her then and his face was wet from crying. “Why? Why’d you have to mess it all up? It doesn’t  _ matter _ what the other kids say. Maybe they’re all lying, did you think about that?” He stood and she took comfort in how his legs shook as well. Maybe…

“Gaara, I don’t think you’re a monster. I promise. You’re not a monster. I won’t talk about it again, okay?” The sand squeezed her tighter and she began to lose feeling in her feet. “I won’t tell anybody this happened, okay?”

For five trembling breaths, nothing moved.

“Gaara,” Sakura tried again. “You’re hurting me.”

Sand fell into piles around her and she went down into the heap, gasping for air. She looked away when Gaara threw up, thinking fervently of her bed and her stuffed animals at home. Ugly splotches mottled her legs. After what seemed like forever, a shadow approached and pinned her feet to the ground. She could see Gaara’s hands hanging limply by his sides and hear him hiccough every so often as his tears abated, but she didn’t look at his face, not then and not when she brought her arms around him in a hug.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a tall figure retreat back behind a pillar. For the rest of the afternoon, no one came to bother them.

* * *

“Why are we getting treats, Kukuri-san? The grown-ups  _ never _ let me into the little village.”

“Oh, it’s just a special occasion, dear,” Kukuri-san said, passing Sakura the skewer she’d pointed at from the grill stand. 

“It’s Gaara, isn’t it.” Sakura watched Kukuri-san from through her bangs and smiled when she saw the older lady flinch. “Do you know what he did to me?”

Kukuri-san’s face went white, but Sakura was impressed by the way she held her head up and led Sakura by the hand to a few sitting stones to the side of the market. Sakura dug in to the spiced cactus, nose already running from the intense flavor she still hadn’t quite gotten used to.

“Yes,” Kukuri-san said. Sakura almost dropped her skewer in surprise, having fully expected Kukuri-san to deny everything. “Gaara-sama is...rather upset, I heard. No one has been allowed into Suna for the past week.”

“And that’s why I’m not playing with him today.”

“...Yes, dear.” 

Sakura hummed. “While we’re out here, can we get some ice cream? Mah-sobo won’t let me have sweets anymore now that we’re training. Ple-ease?”

“Well,” Kukuri-san said, heaving a great sigh. “I might as well enjoy myself.”

Sakura squealed with glee.

“Going to get reamed for this later,” Kukuri-san growled under her breath, but when Sakura beamed up at her she couldn’t seem to help but smile back.

* * *

Mah-sobo did not look at all surprised when Sakura’s chakra paper burned to a crisp.

“I didn’t expect you’d be wind,” Mah-sobo said. “Fire has a way of getting into the gene pool without finding its way back out again. That father of yours, I expect.”

Sakura shuffled her feet awkwardly. “Does that mean I can’t use the fan to make wind?” The cheap training fan strapped to her back clattered in response.

“No,” Mah-sobo said. “You may very well be proficient in wind as a second nature. But you’re far too young to start learning that way, even if your control is good. However, there are other ways to use a battle fan without one’s primary chakra nature being wind. Observe. Chubu!” 

The long fur mantle on Mah-sobo’s shoulders quivered and unraveled to reveal a long, pure white weasel with black eyes. It regarded Sakura solemnly and kicked off of Mah-sobo’s head into the air. Mah-sobo had her battle fan off her back in a flash and opened it partway, bringing it around her body with a grunt. From the tip of the fan Sakura saw the air shimmer and then burst into flames. She cried out when they enveloped the weasel—Chubu must have been its name—and fell back onto her bottom when the flames grew enormous, throwing out sickles of fire which fell upon the dunes with thundering force.

Mah-sobo snapped her fan shut and the flames dissipated. Chubu, unharmed, dropped back out of the sky and curled up around Mah-sobo’s neck once more, black eye drooping down again with a sigh. 

“You see,” Mah-sobo informed a wide-eyed Sakura, “I used a fire jutsu, and Chubu strengthened it with his own wind jutsu. We work together to make the end result stronger. But first you will be paired with your weasel companion. All tribal girls in the inner house receive theirs at age six. You’re well past due, but that mother of yours...”

Sakura clapped her hands together, near-traumatizing experience all but forgotten.

“Can I have a Chubu?”

“Your companion has already been chosen by the weasels. They’ve been watching you to assess your skills.” She reached into a pouch tied to her waist band and came out with a stoat the size of the palm of her hand, with a white belly, brown overcoat, and intelligent black eyes. “This is one of Chubu’s newest grandchildren. She will grow up with you, unlike a summon that is dismissed. Other fan users occasionally contract with the weasel clan as summoners, but our family has a much more serious relationship with them. Now, the first woman in our family to work with the weasels—”

But Sakura had long stopped paying attention. The little stoat spiraled down Mah-sobo’s body and stopped in front of Sakura, who gasped when it stood up on its hind legs to regard her with primly folded hands and bright eyes. It was so  _ cute. _

“I’m going to name you Mochi,” Sakura whispered as Mah-sobo droned on, and reached out to pat it. The stoat examined her hand with a tilt of its head, and then bit down, hard. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE look up “Horde of Baby Mink Fishing” on YouTube.
> 
> Remember: comments are always appreciated and I love every one of them, even if it's incoherent keyboard mashing because you are too tired to do words.


	5. what do you call an emergency that looks just fine?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me readin back over my own shit before posting: o shit that's depressing

It wasn’t all bad, living in Wind. Sometimes, when she felt a little homesick, her parents would lock their doors and close all the windows and make a big blanket fort in the bedroom, just like they’d done in Konoha. The air was still too dry and the food wasn’t the same and the patterns on the blankets weren’t the silly cartoon character sheets she had at home, but it was close enough. In any case, Sakura sometimes had the feeling like the blanket forts weren’t just for her.

Once, under the blanket fort, Sakura’s mother surprised her with a battered copy of her favorite board game. Cardboard animals marched along a forest trail based on rolls of the dice, and every so often you drew a card with some sort of instruction such as “return to Lord Bunsy’s abode” or “you have lost your way in the murky mire: lose two turns.” It was unchallenging and uninspiring and Sakura loved it more than any other game they owned. When Konoha officials had come to their house to tell the family they had to leave, it’d been one of the few things her father had grabbed in the hour they had to pack.

“Ah, jeez,” Kizashi moaned, rolling over onto his side. “I  _ always _ trip over the log. Why does tripping over the log make you go back nine whole spaces?”

“At least you don’t get stopped for a turn because Samurai Badger wants to talk to you. What an ass. Your turn, sweetie.”

Sakura giggled. She already knew the next card would decide the game in her favor. Lady Kitten’s Marvelous Adventure played  _ so _ much smoother when you stacked the deck ahead of time. 

* * *

“Hi, Gaara.” 

“Hi, Sakura. Um, I’m glad you’re here again. I really missed you.” The longing in his voice could almost have convinced her nothing bad had ever happened between them.

She nodded, unable to speak. What was there to say? She loved and hated these visits, now. Although Gaara was her only friend, she’d be lying if she said he didn’t scare her a bit. At least the adults had left them alone entirely. Mah-hobo hadn’t even walked her all the way to Gaara’s building this time, leaving Sakura to make the last two blocks alone. 

Gaara picked fretfully at the edge of his shawl, looking Sakura up and down as though waiting for her to say something else. When the words didn’t come, he flushed and looked at his feet. She tensed up a little when he plunged a hand in his pocket but a glint caught her eye and she leaned closer to see what he’d pulled out. 

In his palm sat a lumpy piece of sand no bigger than a lime. He held it out. When she didn’t reach out for it, he gently took her hand and closed the piece in her palm, pressing it back into her heart.

“It’s for you. I made it.”

He rocked gently on his feet when she held the rock up to her face and examined it. Unlike rock, it wasn’t composed of a single unit but millions of sand grains, but it had the solidness of a rock and none of the grains fell when she scratched at them with a fingernail. When she looked at him, he was in every way like the boy she’d met on the first day, all shy smiles and earnest goodwill. Could he even be the same person who’d wrapped her in sand and made her so very afraid?

“It’s nice, Gaara. I like it.”

He beamed at her, clearly pleased at her reaction. And on an impulse, she stepped forward, unpinning her favorite kitty pin from her headscarf and affixing it to Gaara’s shawl, where it shone all gold and pink and blue. She worried for a moment that Gaara would find it too girly, but he positively glowed as he examined his prize.

“No one but Yashamaru’s ever given me a present,” he informed her, and with no further commentary he led her out of the play room and into a room Sakura had never been in before. There was a large tub in one corner and multicolored tile decorated the floor.

“You get a bathroom all to yourself? We have to share.” She watched as he shucked his clothes off down to thin underclothes and disappeared into the water, which had already been drawn ahead of her visit. Steam still curled up from the surface.

“I can have anything I want. Get in.” 

Slowly, Sakura removed her own outer clothes, tied her hair up, and joined him in the water. He nodded in when she settled in beside him.

“I made it in the dunes,” Gaara said. “My dad is teaching me lightning jutsu. I’m good at it. He left me out there by myself and I walked back when I got bored. When I hit the sand it made that rock.”

“Oh,” Sakura said, taking a deep breath. “That’s nice. Um, my grandmother gave me a baby stoat to train with. I’m not a wind nature person so it’ll be harder for me to learn to use the fan, so, um, I’m going to do fire attacks and the stoat will do the wind part.”

“Wow, then it’ll be twice as strong!” Gaara crowed. 

Sakura gave him a small smile. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. I haven’t been able to make the fire come out yet, though. I don’t have as much chakra as a lot of other ninja. And,” Sakura said, sticking her right hand under Gaara’s nose, “I don’t think my stoat likes me.”

Gaara took her swollen hand in his, examining the angry puncture wounds with pursed lips.

“You’ll get it,” he said with complete confidence. “I know you will.” 

* * *

Darkness draped the interior of the house with near completeness a week later, and Sakura knew before closing the front door behind her that it was going to be one of  _ those _ times. Soft crying led her to the playroom where Gaara lay in the fetal position on the floor, sand creeping up the walls and turning into giant, sandy paws that melted back into the masses again. He cried, holding his head. The smell of blood hovered thick in the room, and her eyes scanned the sand for anything of substance even though she knew she wouldn’t find anything this time, either.

“He made me do it,” Gaara moaned. “I don’t want to hurt them but  _ he  _ makes me do it. Sakura, help me.”

She reached for him though she shook so hard she could hardly walk, the glint of her kitty pin on his shawl giving her strength. If he’d gotten up this morning and put it on, it was him, right? He was okay? People who put on accessories had to be okay. When she touched him he didn’t move or even acknowledge she was there.

“Help me, help me,” he cried. 

Nothing she did this time made him stop crying or look at her or play. Sakura flicked on the night light in the playroom corner and began quietly setting up a tea time for some dolls. She kept her back firmly to the wall as she watched him wail on the floor.

* * *

Her parents argued that night.

“He killed three people this time, Kizashi. They were just walking home from the bars and he killed them.”

“I know. I know.”

“He keeps doing it more and more. Mah won’t tell me shit, but I heard the city guards talking and they think when he suppresses  _ it _ too much around her, it makes him go crazy. Said one day it’d be her next. They just  _ laughed,  _ Kizashi. They all just watch her like some experiment. Those bruises on her legs from that time...I couldn’t believe Mah asked for a couple weeks off. Like she _gives_ a shit.”

“You’re not helping yourself by worrying this much, love. We’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

Sakura crept back along the corridor and into her bed again. Mochi followed, settling into the cavern between the sheet and Sakura’s stomach. After a tearful lesson with Mah-sobo about respecting a creature’s personal boundaries, the little stoat had warmed to Sakura somewhat, though she still wasn’t talking. Chubu said that would come with time.

“They said ‘it,’ Mochi,” Sakura whispered at the stoat curled up underneath the blanket. “And he said ‘he’ made him do it. Maybe he has a bad thing inside of him. I don’t think he’s a bad person.”

Mochi curled into a neat ball and fell asleep, or at least ignored further attempts at engagement.

Sakura reached up underneath her pillow and brought out the rock.  _ Fulgurite _ , Kukuri-san had told her. It happened naturally when the thunderstorm season came. Sakura ran her hands over the gritty surface, smaller now that she’d learned how brittle it was when dropped. Too keyed up to go back to sleep, she stared up at the ceiling and thought and thought and thought herself in circles. She fell asleep with the lightning-rock in her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to those of you leaving comments! I love and appreciate them, as you can probably tell because I respond to all of them in incredibly TMI fashion.
> 
> Raise your hand if you stacked the deck playing Candyland, you monsters.


	6. you are caught until they are dead (as caught as caught could be)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the end of all things.

A blazing heat scorched the earth outside the compound, burning Sakura’s scalp even through her linen wrap. Angry cracks skittered across the hard-packed ground. As far as the eye could see, every plant and living thing hung limp and brittle, supplicating themselves to the power of the sun. The dry season was here.

Sakura stood at the doorway to the tribal compound, looking down into a crack and wondering how far down one could really go. If anyone would ever see her again if she found such a deep crack and jumped in. At her side, her mother gripped her forearm hard enough to hurt. A few feet away, a regally dressed Mah-sobo looked impassively into her youngest daughter’s face, indifferent to Mebuki’s tears as ever.

“Let me take her every so often, at least,” Sakura’s mother spat. “I hardly get to see her except when I come home at night. She’s my  _ daughter. _ ”

“She is of this tribe, and so are you. You are all my responsibility. You’ve hardly shown yourself to be a capable parent. Didn’t you have this one in a cave in the middle of a war? I shudder to think where she’d be if your influence continued unabated.” Mah-sobo began a slow circle around Sakura and Mebuki, stopping again where she was before. Chubu lifted his head briefly from Mah-sobo’s shoulders, looked for long seconds into Sakura’s eyes, and sank back into his own fur again without a whisper.

“She’s  _ my _ daughter. Send a guard if you want. Send your little rat. But I will take her today.”

Mah-sobo sneered. “You just can’t let people do what’s good for you, can you?”

Sakura burst into tears. Immediately the tension broke, and Mebuki dropped to her knees to hug Sakura protectively to her chest as she sobbed. Sakura couldn’t see but heard Mah-sobo give a long sigh.

“Oh, very well. Sakura, I expect you to be at lessons tomorrow morning. Your flames show progress, but you can do much better than just a match’s worth. I take my leave.”

When Mah-sobo had gone, Mebuki kissed the top of Sakura’s head and waited until all the hiccoughs were gone before squeezing Sakura’s hand and rising to her feet.

“Come on,” Sakura’s mother said softly. “We have to go now.”

The early evening sun, while punishing, shone in their faces the entire way, and Sakura felt grateful for the daily assault of sun lotion afforded her by Kukuri-san. Occasionally she looked over at her mother, but Mebuki said nothing, only gave her daughter a thin-lipped smile and walked forward with strong, even steps.

They were a hundred meters out from the city when they heard the roar and felt the ground shake. Mebuki gasped and picked Sakura up like she was nothing more than a baby, turning Sakura’s face away from the tall, narrow gates. There was nothing but horror in her eyes. Two groups of shinobi sped past them, two pausing to convey news.

“It’s out of him—the monster. All civilians have been evacuated, ma’am. Please—oh god, is that her?”

“It’s her, all right. Should we take her someplace safe, just to make sure?”

Mebuki recoiled. “Fuck off.” Sakura had never heard her mother curse like that before. “I’ll kill you if you touch her.”

They looked at one another, and Sakura could see the silent conversation passing between them. She wanted desperately to know what they meant. But then one shrugged and they were both gone in a flash, leaving Mebuki to sink to her knees in the sand, shaking. Another roar rent the air with the sound of a thousand humming dunes, the sound of metal scraping against metal. Sakura struggled out of her mother’s arms and ran like she’d never run before, making for the gates even when the ground shook again and her mother screamed her name.

Rubble blocked some of the narrow path, but Sakura’s small size made slipping past easy. She stopped at the mouth of the city; the cold feeling of dread started in her feet and crept up her body with greedy hands. A creature—massive, tan, toothy, dark-eyed and long-tailed—stood in the midst of the empty village, shrieking with glee as it destroyed everything within reach. 

A monster.

She forced her feet into a run. A pebble on the slope down into the village proper sent her into a wild tumble that only ended at the bottom. She picked herself up, found the nearest stable structure, and climbed. Chakra training with Mah-sobo meant that while she couldn’t yet wall-climb, she could at least use her chakra to help her grip things, and a three-storey building wasn’t that tall, she told herself.

What she saw when she reached the rooftop courtyard took her breath away. There in the middle of the city was creature, a tanuki the size of a building throwing waves of wicked chakra with enough force to knock her down. Chakra-laden wind lashed against her, tiny cuts appearing in her clothes and skin as the jutsu did its work. 

Pressed as she was against the roof of the building, she managed to crawl to the edge and haul herself up on the lip of the rooftop wall. The beast paused in its destruction, nose raised this way and that in the air as though picking up a scent. The scent of her blood. She locked eyes with it, and when the chakra wind dropped down she saw him.

Red hair made it easy to spot him even from this distance. He hung limp from the monster’s forehead and didn’t move. Voices screamed his name over and over again— _ was it her? was that her voice? _ —but he didn’t move. His arms dangled and his head swayed with the monster’s creeping stalk and  _ he didn’t move. _ And then, the monster’s skin rippled, and Gaara was gone. 

Swallowed up. 

_ Gone _ .

She closed her eyes and screamed and screamed. She didn’t stop when she felt her mother’s hands grab hers roughly, drawing Sakura’s stiff body to her mother’s heaving chest, and she must have passed out because when she came to again she was standing in the living room of their little apartment at the compound while her parents ran from room to room, grabbing things that Kukuri-san sealed up into a scroll. Someone put Sakura’s fan on her back.

“My rock,” she said weakly. No one heard her, or no one listened. She didn’t feel the hug Kukuri-san gave her or see the tears that fell down Kukuri-san’s face, and someone hugged Kukuri-san back with Sakura’s body and Sakura’s arms.  _ Is this me? Is it happening _

“Mochi,” she whispered.

“There’s no time,” her father said. Kukuri-san hid her face when they ran— into the courtyard and over the wall. Sakura looked down at the little artisan stands by her tree. Who would get little glass horses and birds when she was gone? 

Sakura blinked. She was on her father’s back. There were dunes all around.

“We can make it if we run hard,” Kizashi said, panting. “We can use the stars.”

“The Kazekage…” Her mother’s voice trembled.

“They’ll be occupied by the city’s destruction. They won’t come looking for us.”

Sakura closed her eyes. Sakura opened her eyes. There was an oasis. Her parents lay down on the ground, two long sushi rolls with one small sushi roll in between: her. They were sleeping. She closed her eyes again.

Sakura looked around. The sun was up, hot and unrelenting. They hadn’t found shelter in time and her parents walked in circles, both trying to keep Sakura in their shadows as much as they could.

A shrill chatter sounded from the horizon and a small brown dot grew closer at high speed. Her parents drew weapons but lowered them when Mochi threw herself into Sakura’s arms, the tiny creature writhing with manic energy. 

“Mochi, Mochi!” Her throat felt scratchy, like she hadn’t spoken in days.

Mochi launched herself onto the sand from Sakura’s shoulder, ran to a farther dune, turned and chattered. Her parents looked at one another, at Sakura, at Mochi, and decided. The three of them ran to catch up with the little stoat, who sped off in a steady line to the east, and out of the desert.

* * *

Standing in her old room feels wrong, somehow. She feels no happiness at her return to Konoha, but neither does she want to be in her bedroom in Wind. She wants to hide. She wants to explode. She wants to throw everything in this room—all the hastily bought furniture purchased by her parents’ old friends—out the window. 

She feels nothing.

Mochi does somersaults in her pocket, searching for a more comfortable position in which to nap. The little stoat had pulled more than her fair share of the weight on the mad dash to the east, taking point and guiding her little family with sharp senses honed to kill small, soft things in the dark.

Sakura stands in front of a full length mirror that has been hung haphazardly on the back of her bedroom door. She stares into her own eyes for ages, almost wishing the tears would come but feeling too empty to do anything else other than just...stare.

Metal and wood clang on the tatami mats, startling her out of her reverie, and she marvels at the battle fan lying on the floor. Mah-sobo had said it was only temporary and Sakura idly wonders if she could have a new one made if she ever broke this one. 

The fan feels heavy in her hands when she picks it up. 

For a moment, she considers shoving it under her bed and never taking it out again. Then, her eye catches a moonbeam’s glint off of a sandy surface. The lightning-rock. She is surprised some part of it had survived the journey here. A piece the size of a prune still remained, and someone had thought to place it on her nightstand. They probably had no idea what it meant to her. Just a souvenir from the village, a petty theft from Mah-sobo’s garden.

She leans the fan against the doorjamb and approaches the rock in three steps, picking it up in two hands, holding her breath as she brings it close to her face. A few tears sting in her eyes but nothing falls. Empty, empty.

“I won’t forget about you,” Sakura whispers. “I’ll never forget about you.”

Mochi jumps from her pocket onto the pillow. Sakura slips into bed, still holding the rock in her hands. Most of it was dull, but when you turned it just right there were things in the sand that shone. With more time, she’d know exactly how to hold it to find all of its shiny places.

“I’m going to get strong,” she tells the rock. “I’m going to get so good at fighting that no one else will have to get hurt by monsters. No one will get killed by monsters either ‘cause I’m there to stop them.”

Mochi lifts her head, tiny ears pricked up in interest.

“We’re going to get good together, Mochi. And when I’m big enough, I’m going to go back and get that monster for what he did to Gaara.”

She falls asleep with the lightning-rock in her hand, mind whirling with battle fans and snarling weasels, a kind-faced boy with red hair and a shy smile, and a shrieking tanuki with fire in its eyes and jagged seals lining its body.

The next morning, on her first day at the academy, Sakura sits in the back of the room and fills out the  _ Nice to Meet You! _ survey with grim determination. On the line “I want to be when I grow up…” Sakura carefully, confidently fills the blank.

_ Killer of Monsters. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Titles borrowed from : https://the-toast.net/2015/11/02/childrens-stories-made-horrific-curious-george/ 
> 
> So like I mention in the end-of-chapter note, I'm thinking of including a sequel for this that takes place during the chuunin exams. The style will be different, more like a traditional story than this experimental slice-of-life style. If you enjoyed this, I'd really appreciate if you'd drop a comment here at the end and tell me what you liked about it and some things you're curious about in this 'verse.
> 
> Thanks to all of you who have commented along the way. You really keep me going!

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me what you think! I'd like to turn this into a little series where I post smaller things while working on other, longer projects.
> 
> Thank you to three wonderful betas for poking at this with me: mouseymightymarvelous, reallystrangecoffee, and DistantVoice. I was taken to task and I am not worthy.


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